Woman, her diseases and remedies : a series of letters to his class / by Charles D. Meigs.

  • Meigs, Charles D. (Charles Delucena), 1792-1869.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Woman, her diseases and remedies : a series of letters to his class / by Charles D. Meigs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    an integer, and should, in strictness, be so deemed, and studied, and understood, and managed upon a reference to it, and not to another integer. Old Paul Barbette, in speaking of that mysterious disease, the plague, says: Deinde, quia licet omnium sseculorum pestilentias diligenter percurras, tam mutabilis semper fuerit, ut nullam omnino invenias, quae adamussim cum alia conveniet. Et haec causa est, quare in curanda Peste prsestiterit judicium tuum bene exercitatum sequi quam aliorum medicorum vestigiis insistere, &c. ; and this true saying is no truer of a plague than of a pleurisy, or a fever Manget. Pestis. It is true that the patient who is under care to-day may be like him who died o' Wednesday, but is not him: hence, you perceive that I am no admirer of statistics, except for the Government, where statistical returns of Agriculture, Commerce, Manufactures, Crime, Population, &c, are useful to the statesman for making his assessments, his calcu- lations, and his levies. When I treat a case of pleurisy, I do not care how you treated your case of pleurisy ; I shall bleed my patient on account of his fever, pain, cough, dyspnoea, &c, and not because you bled your patient, who had similar symptoms, of the gravity of which I am no judge, not having been present to judge. So, if I treat a female with certain pain about the middle of the sacral bone, with dysuria, or retention of urine, &c, by methods calculated to take the strain off from her ligamenta rotunda, and thus cure her of retro- versio uteri, what is it to me that you adopted some other mode? That which interests me is, to be sure that a woman who has ligamenta rotunda not more than two inches and a half long, cannot have her womb turned topsy-turvy. That is the principle which I ought to apprehend, and I shall' carry it out in my practice. Do you get some other principle, if you can, and come to prove my error by your statistics ; I should be strongly inclined to take after Mr. Dennis Bul- gruddery, in the play, who, if bothered with statistics, by his friend Bull, would have been apt to say, To the divil I pitch you and your statistics, Mr. Bull! If you had the statistical report of the weather at sunrise, for the last six thousand years, it could not tell you whether to-morrow morning will be clear or cloudy. Let a man, therefore, make himself so thoroughly learned in Medicine that he can detect the lesion of structure or function wherever it may hide, and then he is the sole judge of the action required in the case: not because twenty other cases were, but because this case is. But I stated that one great cause of unsuccess lies in the absence of information among the population generally. This absence of informa- tion is the fruitful source of Homoeopathy, Hydropathy, Thompsonian- ism, Panaceaism, and all the Catholicons, Infallible worm-destroying